least idea which way to turn on leaving The hound was then so close that they could see the swaying of the bushes on the bank of the stream as he made his way through them. At length he reached the place where they had entered the water. He plunged at once into the stream and ran up and down the opposite bank. He had lost the scent and after sundry desperate efforts to recover it, he stood stock still and bayed aloud his disappointment. money. But that, of course, was no longer necessary. The mail had arrived during Labédoyère's absence, and he found among his letters, to his great surprise, a missive from the old priest summoning him at once to Paris. His friends tried hard to dissuade him from obeying the summons. But the old priest had obtained an ascendency over him which he could not shake off, and he started the following day for Paris, taking the Genoese ex-brigand with him. On arriving in Paris, he went without delay to the address which the old priest had given him, but found the old man had gone out of town. He had, however, left a note behind him for Labédoyère, to say that he would call upon him at midnight on the twenty-third of June. It was now the 17th of June, and Labédoyère sent out that evening an invitation to two of his most intimate and most serious-minded friends to dine with him on the fatal night. He added in a postscript that they would oblige him by retiring at ten o'clock. They knew what that meant, for the story of his mysterious doom had got abroad among his friends. The fatal twenty-third arrived, and Labédoyère and his two friends dined quietly together. At ten he was left alone, as he thought. He placed himself in an armchair in the room in which they had just dined, and began to read Pascal's "Pensées," his eyes meanwhile glancing occasionally off the page of the book to the face of the clock on the mantelpiece opposite. Eleven o'clock struck, and Labédoyère fancied that a clammy numbness was creeping over him. But he tried to persuade himself that it was only nervousness, and made an effort to go on reading. Halfpast eleven struck, and Labédoyère felt his pulse. It was certainly going more slowly than it ought. Still it might be only nervousness. A quarter to twelve struck, and Labédoyère closed his book and sat with his eyes fixed on the clock and his finger on his pulse. There was no doubt now: the pulse had almost stopped, and a deadly chill had taken possession of Labédoyère's frame. And then the great clock of Notre-Dame began to toll out on the silence of the midnight air the hour of midnight the hour of doom for Labédoyère if the old priest was a true prophet. As the echo of the last stroke of the hammer was dying away on his ear, he fell back in his chair in a Labédoyère was greeted as one risen state of semi-consciousness. How long from the dead. The marchese had sent he remained in that state we happen to to his banker in Catania for the ransom | know, for a pair of keen eyes, unknown to Labédoyère and his companion were interested witnesses of all this, and also of the arrival on the scene, half an hour later, of the capobrigante and four of his band. They searched diligently both sides of the stream, and passed and repassed within a few yards of the hidingplace of the men they were in search of. Fortunately it never occurred to them to think of searching that. At last, with some curses at the dog, they appeared to give up the pursuit. But the fugitives did not think it safe to leave their place of concealment till it was quite dark. Then they resumed their flight with a will, and found themselves in the early morning at the Villa San Juliano. him, were earnestly watching him. And before life had quite departed, and while his mind still hovered, as it were, on the border-land of the material world and the world unseen, the pressure of a heavy hand was laid upon his shoulder, and a hollow voice, as, from the tomb, sounded in his ear the startling summons, "Awake, for I am going to shut up the church." The doomed man opened his eyes slowly, and saw standing before him, key in hand, the beadle of Notre-Dame! MALCOLM MACCOLL. From The Fortnightly Review. THE JOURNALS OF CAROLINE FOX.* "AT Falmouth," says Carlyle, in his life of John Sterling, "he had been warmly welcomed by the well-known Quaker family of the Foxes, principal people in that place, persons of cultivated, opulent habits, and joining to the fine purities and pieties of their sect a reverence for human intelligence in all kinds. The family had grave elders, bright, cheery, younger branches, men and women; truly amiable all, after their sort. Most worthy, respectable, and highly cultivated people, with a great deal of money among them,' writes Sterling in the end of February (1840), 'who make the place pleasant to me. They are connected with all the large Quaker circle, the Gurneys, Frys, etc., and also with Buxton the abolitionist. It is droll to hear them talking of all the common topics of science, literature, and life, and in the midst of it: "Does thou know Wordsworth?" or "Did thou see the Coronation? or "Will thou take some refreshment?" They are very kind and pleasant people to know.'"+ among those of her sex who have been foremost and best in this kind. For this high position she seems not to have been critical, independent, original, or in short intellectually powerful enough. In many ways more attractive than characters on whom nature has bestowed a larger dose of pungency and salt, she belongs to a type that is happily not uncommon in our generation. Profoundly devout by natural predisposition and sentiment as well as by education and surrounding, such women find a way of uniting with an everpresent spirituality of mind a sincere interest of secular knowledge no less than in the common facts of human life. Their range is only moderately wide; but within it they are intelligent, sympathetic, appreciative, and, above all, eagerly receptive of moral impressions. Surveying the world with a quiet and gentle eye, such women seldom see the deeper places of the human heart, or the confused perplexity of much of human life and motive. But they impart a singular graciousness to the scene, and their friendship is one of the choicest gifts within men's reach. Miss Fox was born in 1819, and she died in 1871. Like the great emperor, she might at the end of her days have offered thanks to the gods that they had given her good forefathers, good kinsfolk, a good sister, good teachers, and in all that surrounded her, in relations and in friends, people who were usually all of them filled to the full with goodness. This highest kind of good fortune seems never to have deserted her. Her life was no Odyssey, nor is there any story to tell. She was always active in those good works of modest benevolence which kind women find out for themselves, and she watched with pensive solicitude the surg. ing tide of politics and social circumstance as waters beating on a distant shore. But when all is told, she may be counted among those to whom in its best sense we may apply Lamartine's beautiful line, – One of the daughters of this kind and pleasant household was Caroline Fox, and her journals and letters are now given to the public in a volume which is almost Rien ne reste de nous sinon d'avoir aimé. inappropriately sumptuous. Women, as we have been told more often than enough, When she was five-and-twenty (1844-5) are better hands at diaries and corre- the little preliminary memoir informs us, spondence than men, though Boswell, "there came a time of great sorrow.' Cowper, Gray, Horace Walpole, and Vol-"A considerable blank occurs in the jourtaire are proof sufficient that the rule is nals of these and some of the succeeding by no means universal. The lady whose years; what she wrote at this time conjournals are before us will not take a place taining, save so far as is extracted, nothing but a most sacred record of great * Memories of Old Friends: being Extracts from personal suffering and inward struggle. the Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox, of Pen- Hers was a nature to come out of sorrow, jerrich, Cornwall, from 1835 to 1871. Edited by Horace N. Pym. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1882. be it ever so deep or bitter, strengthened. † Carlyle's Life of John Sterling, pt. iii., ch. ii. and ennobled by the lesson, and striving still more earnestly for the victory over self." It is not impertinent, we believe, to conjecture that the death of John Sterling, which happened in the autumn of 1844, had some share in this sorrow. Of that unspoken resignation which belongs to the vast and silent martyrdom of women through the ages, we may well believe that this fine nature had its share. But it is for the most part unspoken in these pages. The English habit of reserve and silence, which is partly a rather stupid shyness, but is partly also due to a true moral delicacy, checks that expansive tenderness of sympathy and aspiration which gives their unspeakable charm to such letters, for instance, as those of Eugénie de Guérin. For this peculiar attraction we must always look to France, whether the reason lies in the larger care that has been given to emotional cultivation, sometimes even amounting to sickliness, by Catholicism; or in the finer sensibilities that are encouraged, by the literary and social tradition of France, so superior as it is in these respects to our own. In the journals and letters before us we have only to divine the tears and prayers and nameless moments of the undefined suffering that is not very far removed from a kind of peace, with which the writer bore her portion of the chagrins of every human lot. All that side is veiled, and it is well that it should be so, for our language is too stiff and masculine easily to lend itself to confessions of fair souls. There is in the book no marked spiritual accent, and there is neither the fever nor the languor, which are so apt in certain high-strung natures to follow one another in painful alternation. On the other hand, there is nothing of the precieuse or the poseuse; and we are in the region of real ideas and sentiments, not of literary minutiæ. The lady's friends were some of the choicest spirits of the time, and intercourse among them was worthy of their high vocation. The names in Miss Caroline Fox's journal show the region in which her chief interests lay. The two men of whom in her pages we see most are Mill (before he had become the head of a school), and John Sterling when he must have been at his best. Beside them, but with less copiousness of record, are Wordsworth, Carlyle, the Bunsens, Maurice, Kingsley, Hartley Coleridge, and many others up to Tennyson. Miss Fox's acquaintance with those conspicuous personages was in some degree the result of accident. Much depended on the chance which brought some people, and did not bring others, to Cornwall and to Falmouth. Still the names that we have cited show the direction and the limitation of her inner thoughts. There is little evidence of keen penetration or of strong grasp in the reports of conversation, and in some cases the point does not seem to have been quite accurately caught. But as a whole the record is intelligent, sympathetic, cheerful, and extremely agreeable. It is one of the books that help to clear away some of the "petty dust that each day brings, our soon choked souls to fill." More than once Miss Fox speaks ill of pleasure. She enters, for instance, that they had tea with her brother at the farm. "He was all a host should be to his large party, but a day of pleasure is not half so pleasant as other days." On these other days what we are conscious of is an even, tranquil radiance of spirit which far more truly deserves the name of pleasure than profusion of more boisterous joy. We could wish that the surgery which is inseparable from all respectable editing had been rather more unsparing. One cannot help observing that Miss Fox's simplicity must often have been imposed upon in respect of the authorship of stories and good things. She attributes to her brother the description of Tom Moore as "a little cupid with a quizzing-glass constantly in motion." Mr. Gregory, whoever he was, must have had considerable courage in telling his Falmouth friends that the following bit of Joe Miller actually occurred to himself: Mr. Gregory told us that, going the other day by steamer from Liverpool to London, he sat by an old gentleman who would not talk, but only answered his inquiries by nods or shakes of the head. When they went down to dinner, he determined to make him speak if "You're going to possible, so he proceeded, London, I suppose?" A nod. "I shall be happy to meet you there; where are your his friend with the energy of despair broke quarters?" There was no repelling this, so out, " I-I-I-I-I-I'm g-g-g-going to D-D-D-Doctor Br-Br-Br-Brewster to be c-c-c-cured of this sl-sl-sl-slight im-impediment in my sp-sp-spsp-speech. At this instant a little white face which had not appeared before popped out from one of the berths and struck in, "Th-th th-that's the m-m-m-man wh-wh-who c-c-c-c-ccured me!" Many of the pointed things are decidedly ancient; the story, for instance, of Charles Lamb being asked by Coleridge, "You have heard me preach, I think?" and replying, "I have never heard you do Talked of Philip von Artevelde (Taylor), Irving, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb being together; and the conversation turning on Mahomet, Irving reprobated him in his strongest manner as a prince of impostors, without earnestness and without faith. Taylor thinking him not fairly used, defended him with much spirit. On going away, Taylor could not find his hat, and was looking about for it, when Charles Lamb volunteered his assistance, with the query, "Taylor, did you come in a h-h-hat or a t-t-t-turban? They go to Bridgewater House to see the pictures and meet Sterling there. His criticisms were 66 very useful and illuminating." He surely then gave them something fresher than this: A fine ecclesiastical head suggested the following story. A Protestant bishop was declaiming to a Roman Catholic on the folly of a belief in purgatory. "My lord," was the reply, "you may go farther and fare worse." There are a good many other facetiæ which might reasonably have amused the worthy Cornish ladies, and might have been fresh to them, and yet which are not at all worth reproducing in a book intended for public perusal, and in other respects so extremely well deserving public perusal. The only other comment that we need make on the editing is that the notes often tell us about people who are already well known, while they as often leave us in the dark about those of whom the world knows nothing. The index, too, is bad. The prefatory memoir, on the other hand, is written in excellent taste and with deep and sincere feeling. where else so vivid an impression of "Mam Henry Mill was only nineteen. James Mill, his famous father, had been dead for four years. John Mill, his more famous brother, was fifteen years older than himself. The " Autobiography" has told us that the stern system which had made the Mill whom we knew what he was, was relaxed with the younger members of the family. "It is impossible," says J. S. Mill, in a touching passage, "not to feel true pity for a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source. This was no longer the case later in life, and with his younger children. They loved him tenderly." It is interesting to think of the sons of that Stoic, whose moral convictions were wholly severed from religion, and who looked on belief in Christianity as a mental delusion, being brought into intimate and affectionate contact with a family to whom religion was the very breath of their life. Here is one of the earliest extracts: March 15.Mamma had an interesting little interview with Henry Mill, and took him in a bunch of Lignonia sempervirens which he exceedingly admired, and thanked her warmly shown him. He particularly enjoys looking for all the little kindnesses that had been into the flowers, and wanted to have them explained, so we sent him Lindley as a guide. Mamina led the conversation gradually into a rather more serious channel, and Henry Mill told Clara afterwards that her kind manner, her use of the words thee and thou, and her allusions to religious subjects quite overcame him, and he was on the point of bursting into tears. She gave him a hymn-book, and Clara marked one which she specially recommended The most interesting episode in the book to many of us of this generation will undoubtedly be John Stuart Mill's visit to Falmouth. Carlyle just mentions it in the "Life of Sterling," but the incident is described in these pages with all the fulness of a diary, and a most charming piece of diary it is. It gives a side of Mill's character in full, which is only dimly and almost drily hinted at in the Autobiography," and which would perhaps be hardly divined from merely read ing Mill's writings. Professor Bain's three papers on Mill, contributed to Mind a couple of years ago, help to fill in the The next day they actually saw the rather meagre narrative of the "Auto-new-comer of whom Sterling had already biography,' "but those who had not the told them as "a man of extraordinary happiness of knowing him can find no- power and genius, the founder of a new "As thy day, thy strength shall be." For the last few evenings they have read him a psalm or some other part of Scripture. school in metaphysics, and a most charming companion." versation with him. mony are the last things abandoned in a departing faith, because the most obvious and connected with the prejudices of the people. March 16. His eldest brother John is now Then we got to Luther and the Reformers. come, and Clara brought him to see us this Luther was a fine fellow, but what a moral is morning. He is a very uncommon-looking to be drawn from the perplexity and unhappiperson-such acuteness and sensibility marked ness of his latter days! He had taught people in his exquisitely chiselled countenance, more to think independently of their instructors, resembling a portrait of Lavater than any and had imagined that their opinions would other that I remember. His voice is refine-all conform to his; when, however, they took ment itself, and his mode of expressing him- so wide and various a scope, he was wretched, self tallies with voice and countenance. He squeezed papa's and mamma's hands without aberrations; and though so triumphant in his considering himself accountable for all their speaking, and afterwards warmly thanked them reform, shuddered at the commotion he had for kindnesses received. "Everything," he said, “had been done that the circumstances made, instead of viewing it as the natural and of the case admitted." Henry received him from the trammels of authority, which he himnecessary result of the emancipation of thought with considerable calmness, and has at inter- self had introduced. "No one," he said with vals had deeply interesting and relieving con- deep feeling, "should attempt anything intended to benefit his age, without at first making a stern resolution to take up his cross and to bear it. If he does not begin by counting the cost, all his schemes must end in disapChatterton, or yield to the counter-current like pointment; either he will sink under it as Erasmus, or pass his life in disappointment and vexation as Luther did." This was evidently a process through which he (Mill) had passed, as is sufficiently attested by his careworn and anxious, though most beautiful and refined, countenance. He sketched the characters of some of the Reformers contemporary with Luther. Erasmus sincerely fancied that he promoted the Reformation by that bending smoothness of deportment and that him; this, indeed, recommended him to kings popularity of manner which characterized and emperors, but his friends were deeply cut by his flexibility and his laisser faire principle. Melancthon's vocation was not to be a leader in any great movement, but to be a faithful follower to the last — and this he truly was to Luther. Amongst other great contingent effects of the Reformation was the influThey made a walking party to Penden-ence it had on the German language; Luther's nis Cavern, with which they were all de- Bible stamped it, and gave it a force, an enlighted. The invalid lingered for some three weeks after his brother's arrival, and J. S. Mill himself remained in Falmouth for a few days longer. He seems to have seen the Foxes nearly every day. They had delightful walking parties, dined together, took their luncheon in the open air, and it was in the air that Mill was at his best. He told them of "the extreme elation of spirits he always experienced in the country, and illustrated it with an apology by jumping." Some of his talk during these pleasant excursions in sympathetic companionship is full of suggestion, though now and then we come upon a remark which we cannot but suppose to be misreported. We may at least be pretty sure that it would be safe to apply to Mill's talk, on these as on other occasions, what Goethe said to a friend of Sterling's about Schiller: "I have never heard from him an insignificant word." J. S. Mill proposed leaving the lighted candles there as an offering to the gnomes. He was full of interesting talk. A ship in full sail he declared the only work of man that under all circumstances harmonizes with nature, the reason being that it is adapted to purely natural requirements. . . . The whole inaterial universe is small compared to the guileless heart of a little child, because it can contain it all and much more.. Speaking of the women in France being those who kept up the appearance of religious zeal more than the men, he in part accounted for it by the sort of premium which the Bourbons would offer on regular attendance and support of established forms. This induced a shrinking from the service in the stronger minds from a dread of the imputation of hypocrisy; and though the effect is bad, the cause is creditable to human nature. Superstition and cere ergy, and a glory with which it has not parted. The Bible and Shakespeare have done more than any other books for the English language, introducing into the soul of it such grand ideas expressed with such sublime simplicity.' On another occasion where Mill had joined the family at dinner and Sterling had come to tea, the afternoon talk had begun with science, architecture, and painters: The evening was then devoted to a glorious discourse on Reason, Self-Government, and subjects collateral, of which I can give but the barest idea. Sterling was the chief speaker, and John Mill would occasionally throw in an idea to clarify an involved theory or shed light on a profound abysmal one. The idea of a guiding principle has been held by the best minds in all ages, alike by Socrates and St. |